Trusting God (or not)

It's remarkable how easy it is to trust God when you don't need to. This has been brought home to me again this week, as we found ourselves again in a situation where we had no choice.

Caleb started throwing up on Tuesday morning, and carried on (every 10 to 30 minutes) all day and night and into Wednesday morning and afternoon. For want of any other options, we took him up to DCMC (Dodoma Christian Medical Centre) - the best of the clinics/hospitals in Dodoma. It is new built and well equipped, but has been having staffing difficulties so only has one, relatively inexperienced, Tanzanian doctor. We were concerned about dehydration and needed to check it wasn't malaria - although he didn't have fever. He was very sick though.

They injected him with an anti-emetic, and then tried to put him on a drip for rehydration. Unfortunately, being a Simkins, he has no veins, so this was something of a fruitless exercise! They then tried to encourage him to drink oral rehydration fluids (1 litre!) If you've never tried this it is the kind of stuff that makes you feel sick even when you're not, so trying to give it to a nauseous 4 year old is (as you can imagine) another fruitless exercise.

With not much else in the way of options, we took him back home. The anti-emetic worked (in the sense that it stopped him vomiting), but unfortunately it made him feel continually like he was going to be sick - which made getting him to drink anything even harder!

Which brings us to trust. We had no alternatives to trusting God at this point, with the knowledge that even with a medical evacuation it would take 4 hours to get him to any kind of emergency care. Unfortunately we find that being obliged to trust God is not a comfortable experience! It might be easier if we knew that no children of Christian parents ever died in the mission field of tropical diseases. But unfortunately, that isn't the case. :( So we can't actually trust God that he will be OK, we can only trust God that he knows what's best (and hope and cross our fingers that God thinks the Caleb being OK is what's best!)

He is much improved now, up and about and pickly as usual - but he is still not eating properly, and has thrown up a couple of times today. So your prayers would be valued, and who knows - maybe God can be persuaded :) Please pray for faith and endurance for us as well - this on top of the stresses we are already facing is not making life particularly enjoyable at the moment. As my friend said this week "This is just not how you expect 'ministry' to be before you come out. What happened to 'the joy of the Lord'?" It's a good question - and one I am still struggling with finding an answer to. All I can say is, the longer I'm a Christian, the less I understand how it works :)

[This is a rare Daniel post, in case you didn't spot it!]